Orientation Day
by Jesse Daniel Dale
Summary: Jack Parry is exposed to the future of University


**Black Mirror Fan Fiction**

Jackson Parry had blonde hair and blue eyes. White skin, strong build, tall. Born with each of these traits in his DNA, unfolding with an interplay of both nature and nurture, into the 19-year-old man entering his first year of University. Jack had been tentatively accepted to the school with an 88 average in High School. His adjusted score put his grade average at a 74, and the school had only so many slots available in his demographic category. Upon acceptance, he was allowed to pick his major from four options: Equity and Empowerment, Historical Correction, Justice and Order, and Post-Comedy. His parents wanted him to choose Equity and Empowerment and so he did. When Jack thinks back on his parents' pride in his acceptance, that is the only part of his current situation that stings. The rest is only deeply confusing to him.

On his orientation and retraining tour, the school issued the cis male students body-cameras to be worn at all times. Jack's father had told him that when he himself was entering college there was a debate about making police officers wear them to prevent the systemic racism in the police force. When he heard stories about disproportional prison populations of the previous generations he could not believe there was ever a debate. The person leading the tour said that xhe had been a student there before being employed and could therefore answer all questions regarding interpersonal relations and campus rules. She explained that the body cameras were to ensure that perpetuators of rape-culture could be exposed to administration and all incidents of sexual activities between students could be assessed to determine if sufficient verbal and written consent had been obtained.

Xhe led the students to the Historical Correction department, where the department heads explained that they were created as part of the 'Great Social Leap' which had been enacted simultaneously across all Universities in the mid 2020s. The professor told the new students that they could be part of a faculty-lead research trip to the Lincoln Memorial to protest. She explained that contemporary Historical Correction Theory was to impose zero tolerance assessments on historical figures. She said that Lincoln had been quoted in his early days of politics as being against interracial marriage and the black vote. They aimed to have the statue removed and destroyed in hopes of repairing the damage it had done to the black community. She said that three years ago they had successfully protested the 'Victims of Communism' memorial and had it removed and destroyed.

The tour continued to the departments of Justice and Order and Post-Comedy. Jack was a little confused when department heads of the Post-Comedy study were explaining their work. They had a research group using algorithms to find social media posts of professional comedians that may have been deleted. They argued that those in the field of comedy were uniquely capable of disseminating harmful ideas about marginalized groups. Current theory dictated a literalist approach in which they discarded with the notion of context and examined direct transcript to infer intention. Leading professors agreed that the concepts of 'context' and 'just-kidding-ism' left a backdoor for comedians to escape accountability for the harmful words they uttered. They were compiling a Comedic Supremacist List which included those who had made disparaging jokes or enacted "context' and 'just-kidding-ism' to support the idea that comedy was exempt from social diagnosis. They included classes in acceptable stand-up comedy and encouraged postmodern theory to question the notion of jokes having to produce laughter. On the wall they had a poster of a clown with half his white makeup washed off. He had a tear on his makeup side and a smile on his washed side.

The Justice and Order department was a close analog to the law schools Jack had seen in old films. Their focus was on revision of the legal code to enact social change. Their core principle was to instill the Great Social Leap's progressive ideas of University standards into local and federal law. They said that in order to be a part of the program, you had to sign confidentiality agreements to guarantee that you will not distribute their training and theory literature to the general public. They argued that the greatest way to enact the tremendous social changes they have made on campuses was through legal retraining of those who will one day enter the existing court and law-making infrastructure. Their aim was to bestow the knowledge that will allow for students to ensure the dismissal of outdated principles and install membership-based legal relativism so that ethnic and gender groups could be tried according to the different standards for each group. Equal application of the law and individual trials were among the outdated principles.

Jack felt sick and nervous while he continued to wait in the head office of his University. Remembering the tour, he stopped feeling confused and started feeling plain dumb for finding himself here. It was so obvious how poorly his actions would be perceived by each of the departments. When he arrived at the Equity and Empowerment department on his tour, it was not what he had hoped. They explained that the research of their department was focused on Merit-Socialism and Discolonialism. Unfortunately for him, that's where Jack drew the line. They engaged their prospective students in an example of the classroom dynamics and practice of the theories that would be in place.

The professor showed the students the layout of the classes. It was divided into 'zones' to which students would be assigned. A pigmentation-test would be performed during the first lecture to determine who sits where. This will be cross-sectioned with a questionnaire determining how students self-identify racially. He was told that the concept of Discolonialism is essentially to correct the mistake of white colonialism in previous centuries via reversal of the practice. Students were divided into Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, Asians, and Arabs. The white kids were in the back corner of the class as a symbol of the Discolonial nature of the classroom. Asians were along side them near the back of the room. The rules of the classroom were that Asians and Whites, who were members of privileged classes, were not to participate in class discussion, as their primary role in the class would be to engage in listening. Their perspectives were inherently tied to their privilege and power claims and were therefore counter to the core concepts of the class. A hierarchy of opinion based on historical injustices was formed to determine the remainder of the seating arrangements. Among the white students, Jack was the only one with blonde hair and blue eyes. The professor informed him, upon reviewing his questionnaire and finding he had indicated German descent, that he would need to wear coloured contact lenses and dye his hair a more suitable colour, so he would not appear so Aryan, Nazi, and white-supremacist. Given his German heritage he would surely see how his appearance may be offensive to students of colour, right? He thought about telling the professor that his family was, in fact, Jewish. He decided it would be a bad idea. He took a drink from his zone's separate drinking fountain and listened.

The Merit-Socialism concept was tied to the school's acceptance policies. It encouraged weighing the high school grades of varying minority groups differently, so as to promote equity and empowerment of racial groups. Asians would be penalized the heaviest, followed closely by Whites, and other races would be neutral or have points added to their grade average. This best reflected Discolonialism and made it much easier for the schools to maintain their strict racial quotas. When applied in the classroom, Jack was told that prior to the 'Great Social Leap' there was tremendous grade inequality in the classroom. Some students would receive 99% scores and others would receive failing scores. What the theory of Merit-Socialism argued was that this inequity created a class-system in which students were subjected to unfair treatment by professors and classmates on the basis of their grades. Students would suffer greatly from this, not receiving their degrees and being asked to cease attendance. Merit-Socialism protects against this by redistributing grade points from the top performers of the class to the low-end performers. Those who had an excess of merit would give what they did not truly need to the rest of the class. Ideally, this would result in everyone earning an approximate grade of 60% with no students failing and equity across the classroom. Jack felt sick, but he couldn't say why.

He went home on a bus full of students chattering about how forward-thinking and safe their school felt. He got to his dorm and thought about watching pornography, but he remembered his body camera was always running. He just put on his dad's Arcade Fire record and fell asleep wearing his headphones. He woke up in the middle of the night and felt like vomiting. He reached for his phone and opened Twitter. He typed the following:

"I don't like only sitting with the white kids. Maybe some stuff in history is important to learn from. I hope the law still just sees me for me, cause I don't know if my school does"

The door to the head office's boardroom opened and he was asked to come in by the head of the Post-Comedy department. He sees a tribunal of all the heads of each discipline waiting to reprimand him for his Tweet. He will face them alone and likely be expelled behind closed doors. Maybe I'll just become a carpenter, he thinks. He remembers the phrase 'Kangaroo Court' and that it means a trial for show, by a phony court, where his guilt is already determined. He thinks 'Kangaroo Court…I thought they only had those in Australia' and stifles a laugh so that his comedy professor will not hear.


End file.
